This Wasn't on the Syllabus: Stories from the Frontlines

This Wasn't on the Syllabus

Stories from the front lines of campus activism against sexualized violence

Curated by Addy Strickland and Emma Kuzmyk

Text copyright © 2024 by Addy Strickland | Emma Kuzmyk

All rights reserved. For information regarding reproduction in total or in part, contact Rising Action Publishing Co. at http://www.risingactionpublishingco.com

Cover Illustration © Nat Mack

ISBN: 978-1-998076-75-8

Ebook: 978-1-998076-77-2

SOC072000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Activism & Social Justice

SOC060000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sexual Abuse & Harassment

SOC051000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Violence in Society

Excerpt from KNOW MY NAME by Chanel Miller, copyright © 2019 by Viking Press. Used by permission of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved

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Content Warning

This book contains stories that talk about sexual assault, sexualized and physical violence, self-harm, body image, discrimination, mental illness, suicide, and other potentially triggering or difficult topics. Please note that all stories and poems mention or discuss sexualized violence to some degree.

You’ll find more specific warnings throughout the book, at the beginning of certain stories.

Please take care engaging with this material, and make time for self-care if you need to.

This book will still be here when you’re ready!

Land Acknowledgement

We respectfully acknowledge that this book was written on unceded Indigenous territory across the settler state of Canada, whose sovereignty relies on continued exploitation, violence, and the ongoing settlement of stolen lands.

Given the subject matter of this anthology, we would be remiss to begin without specifically acknowledging the high rates of physical and sexualized violence faced by Indigenous peoples—particularly by women, girls, and Two-spirit individuals—that are part of both an historical and ongoing genocide of Indigenous populations.

Many, if not all of the post-secondary institutions written about in this anthology are complicit in this violent, ongoing colonization.

As an editorial team made up of settlers, we take responsibility for learning and seeking long-term transformation in our relationships with Indigenous peoples and land, particularly as they pertain to organizing and taking action on issues of sexualized violence.

This anthology is dedicated to every campus activist fighting sexualized violence who has ever felt discouraged, let down, burned out, or defeated.

We hear you. We see you. We believe you.

Change is possible.

Foreword

Mandi Gray

Over the last decade, there has been a resurgence of anti-violence activism on post-secondary campuses across Canada. Much of this labour has been fuelled by what we faced when we reported sexual violence or supported a friend who had been harmed. In 2015, I was in the first year of my PhD when I was sexually assaulted by another student. Only a decade ago, there was no sexual assault policy nor were there any dedicated staff for supporting students like me. There have been many changes that have happened on campus that we can attribute to the dedicated labour of survivors and their allies. This work has filled massive policy gaps and challenged discriminatory rape myths in institutional responses (or lack thereof).

We couldn’t have done this without the labour of the feminist activists who came before us. We are indebted to the feminists of the 70s and 80s. They provided us with the language of sexual violence to identify our experiences as such. They advocated for much-needed legal reform in criminal law. They identified sexual harassment as a critical problem on campuses across the country. The feminists of the 90s and 00s fought for sexual harassment offices, circulated Chilly Climate reports to document the sexism and racism in many university departments across the country, and created feminist-led safety audits to assess the physical safety of campuses for women and racialized community members.

For many of us, the institutional failures have been just as harmful as the initial act of violence—whether it is senior administrators minimizing the report of sexual violence as simply an interpersonal conflict, long waiting lists for counselling, or being forced to continue taking a class with the perpetrator. Experiencing sexual violence while attending a post-secondary institution has unique consequences. Survivors often continue to attend classes with the person who harmed them, or the perpetrator might even be their instructor who has incredible power over their future. The campus, which may have felt at one time like a safe community, now feels like an absolute betrayal after their disclosure wasn’t taken seriously. Some may abandon their studies and future career plans altogether. Some survivors face backlash for reporting, as demonstrated by the growing number of defamation lawsuits that faculty members accused of sexual violence have initiated with the intention of intimidating survivors into silence.

Survivors who face numerous forms of intersecting structural marginalization also come up against unique barriers to justice. For example, international students risk losing their visas if they fail or drop out after they experience sexual violence. Students who engage in sex work might be fearful of reporting out of fear of blackmail by the perpetrator. Black, Indigenous, racialized, members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, and disabled students are often subjected to intersecting discriminatory stereotypes that diminish their victimization and are often even far less likely to make formal reports despite experiencing disproportionate rates of gendered violence. While we should be proud of how far we have come, we still have a lot of work to do to ensure that all members of the campus community are safe from violence and oppression.

This Wasn’t on the Syllabus is critical because it documents the many challenges that survivors and their allies face when advocating for much needed change in institutions that are often resistant and at times out right hostile. The pieces included in this collection provide stories of feminist victories, survival, and collective rage, which help us to see just how much work has been done and provide future generations with lessons learned to continue fighting for a future that ensures that all campus community members are safe.

The latter chapters of this book provide a glimpse into the possibilities for the future. It is important that we spend time dreaming and imagining a future that is safe for everyone and what that could look like. Safety is far more than simply the absence of violence. It is a space where everyone is heard, validated, cared for, and accountability is not just a hollow word. This is what we must continue to strive for.

Introduction

Addy Strickland and Emma Kuzmyk

No one gets into activism on purpose. When it comes to combatting sexualized violence, you don’t wake up one morning and decide I’m going to fight my university’s administration, or I’m going to rewrite my school’s sexualized violence policy; rather, you listen as an upper-year student tells you which professors to worry about. You cringe while reading poorly worded emails from administration. You decide not to go out because you don’t feel like being cat-called or groped and the walk across campus is dark and empty. By the end of your first year, you listen as every single one of your female friends tells you they’ve been harassed or assaulted.

For far too many, sexualized violence is an unfortunate and unexpected side-effect of the post-secondary experience. It’s something you’re forced to learn about, even though it might not appear on any of your course syllabi. Statistics Canada found that one in ten women were sexually assaulted while attending post-secondary institutions in 2019 alone, and that 71% of all students experienced some form of unwanted sexualized behaviour. ¹ These statistics are shocking enough at face value, but those involved in prevention and response work will also concur that both are most likely under-representations due to ongoing barriers in reporting.

For decades, activists and allies have been fighting to change those statistics and to rewrite the culture of sexualized violence on post-secondary campuses. There have been protests, petitions, sit-ins, walkouts, and endless campaigns, alongside tireless work towards policy and systems change. Our own experiences encompass only four short years of activist work—much of which would not have been possible without the work of those who preceded us—and it often feels as if we crammed decades of learning into what is, in the grand scheme of things, not a whole lot of time.

Coming to the end of those four years, as most senior students are prone to do, we started to reminisce on everything that happened. What went on in the classroom was, perhaps unsurprisingly, only a small part of our conversation. Instead, we remembered writing an open letter to university administration part way through our first semester. We remembered marching onto the basketball court in the middle of an open house with megaphones and linked arms. We remembered planning protests from the basement of an old residence hall, and painting words of resistance onto the windows of another. We remembered how it felt to march across campus in a pack of badass women, and to scream our worth at the top of our lungs. We also remembered how it felt to be told no and never and not here over and over again. We remembered the dozens, if not hundreds of stories of trauma we heard from our peers, and we remembered sitting across the boardroom from administrators, trying to hold ourselves together while they asked us to prove that increased student supports were necessary.

Reminiscing about everything we went through and everything we learned in the process, we wanted to create something to honour the experiences we had while also passing on what we learned to future generations of activists. Somewhat jokingly, we threw out the idea of writing a book—we’d both written, published, and performed in various other media, so why not tackle something bigger? Evidently, we quickly stopped joking. Rather than only telling our own stories, however, we wanted to include the voices of other activists across Canada who were doing similar work and facing similar challenges. Hence, the idea of writing a book morphed into the anthology you’re holding now.

Throughout this anthology, you’ll find an array of stories, poems, and speeches written by student activists—both past and present—fighting sexualized violence on Canadian campuses. Sending out our call for submissions in 2021, the goal was to achieve as wide a range of stories as possible, representing the diversity of experience that exists across Canada, across campuses, and even within movements. We wanted to show the world the amazing work being done by students that is so often overlooked, and so rarely celebrated. The stories presented in this anthology come from twenty-four activists from seven provinces, writing about their experiences at fifteen different post-secondary institutions. Each of the stories are unique and demonstrate the diversity we were looking to achieve, yet by virtue of the work we do, also highlight the common experience of fighting for action and justice on issues of sexualized violence.

Across three categories—What We Faced, What We Built, and How We Survived—this anthology makes space for conversations about active protest, collective action, contentious movements, community care, institutional failure, combatting rape culture, creating solutions, and more. In the first section, What We Faced, our contributors write about and reflect on what it’s like to confront post-secondary institutions and their troubling policies (or lack thereof) head on. Among others, you’ll hear from the two of us, as well as from a few of our peers, about various movements that occurred during our time at St. Francis Xavier University (StFX); from Michelle Roy, who led a series of protests against sexualized violence at Mount Allison University in 2020; and from Caitlin Salvino, who founded the national OurTurn movement in 2016.

In What We Built, you’ll read stories about how peer support programs had their start at various institutions, including StFX, Dalhousie, and the University of Toronto. You’ll hear from Shelby Miller, who founded a near-national ribbon campaign in support of survivors; from Cameron Smith, who worked to rewrite Acadia University’s sexualized violence policy and from Maddie Brockbank, who has led award-winning work, engaging men in conversations about sexualized violence prevention at McMaster. In How We Survived, you’ll hear from the co-founders and co-chairs of Students for Consent Culture Canada (SFCC)—a national, student-led non-profit supporting student activists across the country—about how they integrate practices of care into their work. You’ll read stories about recovery, about community care, about taking back power, and so much more.

Scattered amongst these stories and personal essays, you’ll find a variety of poetry, as well as transcribed speeches from the women’s marches, Take Back the Night events, and protests that our contributors have organized and spoken at. We don’t believe that activism has any one form, so writing about it shouldn’t either. In our own activist experience, creative work was a place of grounding, and a way to deal with the messy, complicated emotions that came with standing up for what was right; it was an alternate means of expressing what was often too difficult to process or say out loud. In many cases, poetry came first, and activism was a way of putting poetic imaginings into action. And so, it has a home here on our pages—offering a window into the hearts and souls of student activists from across the nation.

It would be unjust to begin, as well, without acknowledging those who have come before us. Activists have been speaking up against institutions for decades, fighting for policies where before there were none and then continuously fighting to improve them, and believing and supporting survivors since before there were specific platforms and hashtags created to do so. It was their bravery and commitment to justice that have made the activism detailed in this book possible, and through our own work, we hope to continue honouring theirs.

This work has never been easy. It can be exhausting, isolating, triggering, and at times, frustrating beyond words. Often, it can feel as if you’re fighting a battle that can never be won, and yet, there are wins happening all around us. For many of us who are just leaving our campuses, we might not understand how much change we’ve made until we think back on what our campuses looked like four, five years ago—recognizing change, especially gradual, messy, high-level, complicated change that happens over the span of so many years, is not an easy task. Sometimes, in order to see the progress we’ve made, we have to stop and reflect on where we started, and on how far we’ve come. We hope that the stories highlighted here will help start you, our wonderful reader, on that path of reflection and recognition, and that you might find hope and energy in the collective memory and experience of our contributors.

1. One in Ten Women Students Sexually Assaulted in a Postsecondary Setting. Statistics Canada, September 14, 2020. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/200914/dq200914a-eng.htm.

This Wasn’t on the Syllabus

Stories from the front lines of campus activism against sexualized violence

This book is a collection of stories about real life experiences of activism. Each contributor’s story is their own, and reflects their experiences, memories, and emotions. Others who were part of the stories featured here may have different experiences. The intention of sharing these stories is to bring awareness to the pervasiveness of sexualized violence in post secondary spaces, draw attention to the courageous actions of activists across Canada, and create a space for those activists to pass on their learnings to new and emerging activists doing similar work. 

What We Faced

Stories of protest and collective action against rape culture, institutional inaction, ineffective policies, and more.

I Wonder

Emma Kuzmyk

Content Warning: Description of sexual assault and physical violence

I used to wonder

When the simple act of walking home made us

So small,

And wonder

Why she feels the need to pretend to make a call

To her fake boyfriend,

And wonder

Why this fake boyfriend has been used

So much,

And wonder

When these questions will be pulled back up

From under the rug,

And wonder

When they will respect our nos

More than the idea of being someone else’s possession,

And wonder

When bringing this up will create more

Than just tension.

And then I began to wonder

Why it was that him having drank too much

Makes it okay,

And wonder

Why when she does the same, we tell her that

Well, she shouldn’t have drank so much anyway,

And wonder

When we will finally start to shift the blame

And now,

I wonder

If you felt her heart break

When you broke into her

I wonder

If the halt of her breath ever made you wonder

If maybe you should halt as well

I wonder

If the impact of your fist

On her skin

Had any impact on you at all

I wonder

If hurting her ever made you hurt

As well

I wonder

If telling her that she was 6 years younger

Than your younger sister

Told you anything

At all

I wonder

If the strength that you used to hold down her arms

Made you feel strong

I wonder

If it was her complete lack of appetite

That fed into yours

I wonder

If her complete inability to respond made you pause

At all

I wonder.

I wonder

Why this has happened over and over

And only right now

Seems large,

I wonder

Why this fucked up justice system

Makes it so hard

To come forward,

I wonder

When we started to take plagiarism more seriously

Than sexual assault,

I wonder

Exactly who it is that makes that call,

I wonder

When this will stop.

Almost as much as I wonder

When we will start

To fight back.

I wonder

If we can raise our voices loud enough

To finally be heard.

I wonder

When every single one of us will stand

Behind her.

I wonder

When this silence that’s been established

Will finally

Be disturbed.

I wonder

If it is now.

X-Resist: Responding to Institutional Inaction

Addy Strickland

The air in the hallway is tense with anticipation and nervous energy. We are silent, out of necessity, eyeing the X-Patrol officers stationed at the gymnasium doors as we shuffle closer—anxiously adjusting the teal ribbons pinned to our jackets and sweatshirts, readying cameras and megaphones. Half our group makes their way to the opposing entrance, and we wait until we see them through the opposite window to make our move. It’s the loudest quiet I’ve ever felt, waiting in that hallway—you can almost hear the energy buzzing.

Now! someone behind me shouts, breaking the silence with what is still almost a whisper, and we surge into the gym from both ends—interrupting the university’s open house with gusto. Another student, who was one of the driving forces behind the protest, takes centre stage as she shouts a list of demands into a megaphone, the rest of the group linking arms behind her. It’s a powerful image of solidarity and dissent that will accompany national headlines for weeks to come. It is also just the beginning.

Shortly after the start of the new school year, news broke about a student who had left the university. She’d returned to campus excited to see friends and start classes, only to find out that the man who’d harmed her—who she’d been told had been suspended—had returned as well. What the university had failed to tell her is that despite being found responsible by the university’s internal investigation the previous year, the man had issued an appeal, and the suspension had been put on hold.

The news sparked rage and devastation for a lot of people. On the tail of another noteworthy case the year before, the fire had already been started—most of us didn’t know the woman who left, but we knew too many others with similar stories. We were tired of watching sexual violence get swept under the rug, tired of watching the university do too little to support survivors. Two days after the article came out, a professor in our Women’s and Gender Studies department organized a series of meetings for concerned individuals to come together, share their own stories, and channel their rage into action. It was a powerful, emotional space. I remember sitting in the packed auditorium with tears in my eyes, listening as so many people stood up and said it happened to me too, and watching the overhanging grief transform into a plan. What came out of those meetings was an array of ideas for protests, a critique of the school’s reporting and disclosure system, and the following message (copied verbatim from a follow-up email):

WE WON’T STOP UNTIL CHANGE HAPPENS!!!!! THIS ISN’T GOING TO DIE DOWN IN A WEEK! KEEP PUSHING!!

The conversation continued online, and plans for what came next quickly started to take shape. The university’s upcoming open house was identified as a prime location for having our voices heard, with a guaranteed audience of prospective parents and students, as well as the university’s president. In preparation for the event, the hashtags #IStandWithHer and #IAmHer began to circulate on social media as survivors and supporters posted messages of solidarity with the woman who left and shared their own stories. Similar messages soon began to appear on residence whiteboards, and in windows across campus. Posters emphasizing survivors’ rights to education and furthering messages of solidarity went up by the dozen, and volunteers folded, pinned, and distributed teal ribbons to anyone who wanted to wear their support. A list of demands, drafted at the initial planning meetings, was finalized.

It was a hectic few days for those involved—myself included. As plans fell into place, there were a lot of moving parts to keep track of, and not everyone on campus was friendly to the idea of protest. Soon enough, however, we ended up in the hallway outside of that open house. Earlier that morning, we congregated in the pit—an auditorium-like space in an old residence, temporarily home to faculty offices because of construction. Someone brought poster board and markers, someone else a Tupperware container full of teal ribbons. A friend from Toronto sent me twenty dollars for tea and Timbits, which were passed around as we hammered out the last few details of our plan. The weather was still reasonably nice for that time of year, and the short walk across campus to the rec centre helped the group shake off some nervous energy. After moving inside and waiting in the hallway for what felt like eternity, we ended up where I started the chapter: facing off against the university president in the middle of an open house.

The demands read were as follows:

1) We demand that survivors be informed and protected throughout the entire reporting and investigation process, including any actions that might be taken after the process is complete.

2) We demand that all decision-makers and contributors to the sexual violence policy need to receive education about sexual violence that is survivor-centred and trauma-informed.

3) We demand that the university make a financial commitment to sexual violence prevention.

4) We demand tangible models of assessment for concepts such as risk and foreseeable threat.

5) We demand a communication plan that informs the campus community of incidents of sexual violence and action taken.

6) We demand a reconstruction of the sexual violence policy that centres survivors and is done with expert oversight.

We didn’t wait around for a response, and as we left the gym, the sound of the president’s voice carried as he pointed out the teal ribbon someone had pinned to his lapel.

We made our way back to the pit, where campus security had revoked the keycard access of the professor who had let us in and helped coordinate the protest. Someone else managed to get us back into the building, and we settled into a circle on the floor—utterly exhausted, but still buzzing with the excitement of what we’d just pulled off—for a group debrief. Going around the circle, we shared what the action meant to us, and what change we hoped to see. While listening to everyone speak, I downloaded the protest photos from my camera, sent off an email to the media, and posted the images on Twitter. We were making national headlines the next day, and word from the remainder of the open house was that parents weren’t too happy about sending their kids to a school that couldn’t properly address sexual assault.

In the weeks following the open house, StFX organized a series of open forums for admin to listen to the voices of students, staff, faculty, and community members. They were, from the point of view of many, yet another excuse for administration to take a few performative steps in the right direction before going back to their usual means of operation: pretending they don’t have a problem. Still unsatisfied with the university’s actions, X-Resist interrupted the second forum dressed in a uniform of all black with teal ribbons and toting a sign declaring WE ARE THE RESISTANCE over and over again, representing the thousands of people calling for change. During question period, Kait was handed the mic, and presented the university’s president with a hard copy of a petition that was launched shortly after the initial protest, now containing more than five thousand signatures. The number might not seem huge, particularly to those who attended larger universities, but for a school of just over four thousand students, it was nothing to laugh at.

There were other, smaller continuations of protest as the semester came to an end, but that open forum marked the beginning of a resolution, if only temporarily. Ultimately, it was the cumulative impact of not only our semester of resistance, but of the decades of anti-violence work being done on campus before our arrivals, that led to action on the part of the university. Later that year, StFX welcomed an external panel of experts to review our sexualized violence policy and implemented a much-improved version of the document. They introduced a permanent position for a trained individual to handle disclosures, reports, and support survivors. They finally added a resource list to emails regarding sexualized violence. At some point in the semester, the man whose return sparked the protests voluntarily withdrew from the university. These were all demands made by students, faculty, and community members.

Many of the demands on our petition were met, but many were not, and the university’s response is still not perfect by any means. Two years later, the student who was initially suspended returned again to the StFX campus after being acquitted by a Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge. Despite a resurgence of protest (virtual this time, due to COVID-19), unfavourable media coverage, and the fact that they had, two years earlier, found the man responsible through their own internal processes, the school claimed they had no reason to deny his admission or enrolment. The new policy, at the time I’m writing this, while leagues better than the previous, still relies on legal jargon that is largely inaccessible to much of the student body. Training on receiving and responding to disclosures or on preventing sexualized violence still isn’t mandatory for all staff, faculty, and students. Survivors are still forced to deal with systems that feel like they aren’t built for them. There has been progress, certainly, but we are nowhere near where we need to be.

X-Resist was a breaking point, but it was also a turning point, and a starting point for something better. It was dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of people deciding they’d had enough—that they wouldn’t put up with inaction and insufficient policies any longer. It was an interruption. The active protests and petitions happened over the span of only a few months, but the energy I felt at that first open house has lingered. Consistently, when issues of sexual violence have come up since, someone has put out the call, and people have stepped up—offering legal resources and information about support services, coordinating media coverage, circulating open letters and petitions, contributing to zines and newspaper features. In contrast to what happened at the open house, those smaller acts of resistance haven’t been revolutionary, but they’re a testament to the lasting effects that collective and contentious action can have on university campuses.

#MeToo

Kylee Graham

This poem was first published online in Laurel & Bells Literary Journal

’Cause you think you’re so big and so tall

and us so scared and so small

but we’re not

we’re done hiding

we are rising

Does our truth hurt?

Hurt like those words

and your hands

their stares and demands

you did this to yourself

It couldn’t possibly be their

boss

friend

brother or lover

as long as they were admired and covered

by the strength of cowards

You showed us that there’s power in numbers

well then I’d be scared because while you all slumbered

on your thrones of entitlement and institutionalized security

we’ve been building bridges out of each other’s despair

climbing mountains of self-worth

you were so unaware